What is your strategy for handling requests? Most people like helping others. If somebody makes a reasonable request of us that we can do, it’s hard to say no. But what do you do when the number of requests exceeds what you can actually do? This is actually not a hard question. Most of us…
Month: May 2024
It can be a good sign when you are criticized.
It can be a good sign when you are criticized. I once read a story of about a high school football player who was getting yelled at by the head coach. He was getting dispirited, wondering if he was even any good at football if he was getting all this criticism. An assistant coach took…
It took me a long time in my career to figure out what Owain Lewis shares below to make better decisions by doing what’s best for “the business”, in part because I didn’t know what mattered. I focused on what looked like the right thing from my limited perspective early in my career, and had no clue what was keeping my company leaders up at night. Admittedly, that was partly because those leaders were not communicating their concerns.
It took me a long time in my career to figure out what Owain Lewis shares below to make better decisions by doing what’s best for “the business”, in part because I didn’t know what mattered. I focused on what looked like the right thing from my limited perspective early in my career, and had…
What would your ideal day at work look like?
What would your ideal day at work look like? I recently led a few clients through this simple visualization exercise, but it’s amazing what comes up. People rarely take the time to think about what they want out of work, as they are struggling to survive each day. But when you have a vision to…
How will you use this?
How will you use this? I often see situations where a stakeholder asks for something, but then are disappointed even when they receive what they asked for. This is frustrating for both parties – the stakeholder didn’t get what they wanted, and the person that did the work feels like they wasted their time. This…
How did we create a system where accountability is so diffused that there’s nobody to blame when things go wrong?
How did we create a system where accountability is so diffused that there’s nobody to blame when things go wrong? Dan Davies answers that question in his new book, The Unaccountability Machine: Why Big Systems Make Terrible Decisions – and How The World Lost its Mind, by using a framework called management cybernetics that applied…
Let go of your current work and train your successor.
Let go of your current work and train your successor. I was chatting with a CTO last week who shared this piece of management advice. His perspective was that while his job was interesting now, he didn’t want to do it forever. He had already identified the person on his team that could succeed him,…
Time for my biweekly newsletter!
Time for my biweekly newsletter! This week I wrote up my thoughts on three books that reinforced each other in an alternate perspective to the more conventional capitalist, “free market” orthodoxy where “great men” (and it’s always men) do great things. Black AF History: The Un-Whitewashed Story of America, by Michael Harriot, flips the spotlight,…
I appreciated Ijeoma Oluo’s book, Be a Revolution, for sharing what drives social justice activists, and how each of us can take action to support those movements.
I appreciated Ijeoma Oluo’s book, Be a Revolution, for sharing what drives social justice activists, and how each of us can take action to support those movements. What made this book particularly powerful for me is that each chapter contains multiple interviews with movement workers who share their engaging stories of what they faced that…